Pearl

“They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important - that they are important. You don't get punished for doing something unimportant, after all.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Sometimes I thought life was precious, and everything was so important; but other times I thought humans were insignificant, and nothing was worthwhile. Anyway, my life passed day after day accompanied by this strange feeling, and before I knew it, I was old.…”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“There were stories in sweat.

The sweat of a woman bend double in an onion field, working fourteen hours under the hot sun, was different from the sweat of a man as he approached a checkpoint in Mexico, praying to La Santa Muerte that the federales weren't on the payroll of the enemies he was fleeing...
Sweat was a body's history, compressed into jewels, beaded on the brow, staining shirts with salt. It told you everything about how a person had ended up in the right place at the wrong time, and whether they would survive another day.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“He lacked the ability to thrive in society, but also the resources to ignore it. All he could do was hang on to the edge, suffering.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End